Entrenched, somewhere deep within the recesses of our minds, lays a desire—however dormant and suffocated—to breathe expansively of the infinite possibility encapsulated within Friday night.  Likely indoctrinated from countless hours spent courting joy in the face of boundless school-time mundanity; and continually perpetuated by the metropolitan “9-5”—Friday holds unique precedence in the hearts of the American populace. Embodied in myriad forms—the 5 o’clock 12 pack, the communal call to arms of friends and family, the happy hour release—there is a sublimely distinct strain of buoyancy enmeshed within Friday, most frivolous of its six compatriots.

That modern culture has highlighted and commoditized this particular day evinces the profitability of such an ideology. This visage of promise befuddles reason in favor of release—a release from the self-imposed tethers, willingly adorned as proof of acceptance into the swollen ranks of the proletariat.  William Blake likened it to “mind-forged manacles” in his incisive portrait of an over-industrialized London—a prisonous myopia of logic and reason convoluted by the ravenous maw of societal “obligation." Conscripted into acquiescence, and spoon-fed the gruel of the “American Dream," “Friday Night” superficially exists as an anthropological panacea for the dejected, disenfranchised masses.

The irony exists in the inevitability of our stations. In our life-long pursuit to escape the unsavory social “nether regions” in hopes of attaining the lofty ambrosias of the upper echelon—we as a country are predisposed to fight tooth and nail to usurp a hierarchy of fabricated social dogmas. The heart of this conundrum lies in the cultural zeitgeists we endorse and continually subscribe to—Friday being but one of many.

A nation’s collective conscious, while nebulous, is privy to the inexhaustible engine of social mores—both apparent and subliminal—that defines the crux of our perceptions. Plain speak:  The mystique of “Friday” is both prison and panacea, one created, validated, and sustained by the countless millions ensnared within the American system.